House of Sound: Composer Jeff Beal Talks David Fincher, Scoring Netflix’s Breakout Hit, and Jazz

When composer Jeff Beal heard that director David Fincher was involved in an intriguing television project with Netflix, he wanted in. That project was House of Cards, an original series starring Kevin Spacey as House Majority Whip Frank Underwood, a vengeful political animal with scores to settle. Fincher asked Beal to submit some musical sketches, and what Beal created ended up becoming the basis for the show’s theme,

The Sky’s the Limit: Cinematography’s Technological Revolution

Just as smart phones and tablets are changing the way we experience daily life, other technologies are dramatically shifting the cinematic landscape. Directors today can harness these tools in order to express their artistic vision on the screen as never before. We spoke with two of the most significant players in this field in order to find out what’s possible now, and what we can expect to see in the future.

3D moves beyond ‘next big thing’

By The Book: Literary Icons Flock to Hollywood

Los Angeles, arguably best known for its flagship status as a gateway to Hollywood and the film industry at large, has developed uncountable stereotypes for the culture that populates its traffic-clogged arteries. And while there might be too many LAisms to count (for starters: epic taco trucks, grass-scented juice bars, fuzzed-up band members sauntering down Sunset Boulevard, etc. etc.) those reserved for the film industry are particularly iconic misnomers. Among them, my favorite: the questioningly ambitious,

Writer-Director Derek Cianfrance on The Place Beyond the Pines

Ryan Gosling may have recently suggested that he is taking a break from acting, but fans can still find solace in this weekend’s release of The Place Beyond the Pines, a triptych that reunites him with Blue Valentine writer-director Derek Cianfrance.

The cops and robbers caper—costarring Bradley Cooper, Eva Mendes, and Ray Liotta—traces the ramifications caused when Gosling’s character, a drifter-cum-motorcycle stunt driver,

The Art of Armory: Chatting With Game of Thrones Costume Designer Michele Clapton

Emmy and BAFTA award winning costume designer Michele Clapton has perhaps one of the most demanding, and most fun, jobs in TV—she clothes the wild, epic world of HBO’s Game of Thrones. Clapton, who works in Belfast, Ireland, heads up a team of weavers, embroiderers and armorers as she creates the costumes, most of them from scratch (they have their own loom in which they weave the fabric) for a show unrivaled in its scope,

Triple Threat: Chatting With Film/TV/Video Game Composer Christopher Lennertz of NBC’s Revolution

Christopher Lennertz’s composing career has settled nicely across three mediums, making him one of the busiest musicians in Hollywood. His most recent film successes includes scoring a string star-studded comedies like Identity Thief, Think Like a Man and Horrible Bosses. For scoring TV, his credits include NBC’s new series Revolution, about a family struggling to reunite in a totally powerless American landscape–and we mean that literally,

The Art of Adaptation: Talking With Karen Croner, Admission Screenwriter

Best known for her adaptations of Olive Ann Burns’ Cold Sassy Tree and Pulitzer Prize winner Anna Quindlen’s One True Thing, screenwriter Karen Croner is, above all things, a writer’s screenwriter if there is such a thing. Croner’s first stab at comedy hits the screen this weekend in the ever-capable hands of Tina Fey and Paul Rudd in Admission. Focused largely on the nervous breakdown suffered by a Princeton University admissions officer played by Fey,

From Making Hats to 3D Cats: Self-Taught Animator TJ Nabors Helps Create The Croods

TJ Nabors has taken your typical road to becoming a top animator in Hollywood—she started out designing hats. She was in theater at the University of Texas, and was focusing on textiles and costume, when she took a particular shine to the creation of hats. "There was a distilled and theatrical power to transform the wearer," she says. The power to transform one thing into another would become a theme in Nabors professional life, as she transformed herself into a self-taught animator,

511 Days of Total Darkness: The Incredible True Story Behind the Documentary No Place on Earth

In 1993, shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union, NYPD officer and caving enthusiast Chris Nicola set out to Western Ukraine to explore Verteba and the Priest’s Grotto Cave, one of the longest cave systems in the world. Inside the caves—dark, damp, and stifling, wholly inhospitable to human life—he found the unthinkable: buttons, shoes, a house key, artifacts of human habitation decidedly recent. Upon returning from the caves, his attempts at discovering the origins of these items led him to only the offhand comment from a local villager that,

Composer John Debney Answers The Call, and Goes Really Dark

Incorporating ‘found sound’ into his score for director Brad Anderson’s The Call, Oscar nominated composer John Debney wasn’t afraid to get weird. From slapping the tops of pianos to creating a bizarre engine revving sound for the film’s deranged lunatic, he took risks. The result is a truly unsettling soundscape–from the same man who wrote the score for Elf, no less.

The Call,

Meet William Corso, Oscar Winning Makeup Artist Behind The Incredible Burt Wonderstone

With a formidable resume that includes five Steven Spielberg movies (from Amistad to Munich), eight Jim Carrey movies (from The Majestic to this Friday’s The Incredible Burt Wonderstone), and dozens of film and television projects in between (from Jackass: The Movie to Grey Gardens), makeup artist William Corso has become one of the most esteemed—and in-demand—behind-the-scenes guys in Hollywood.

Eleven Very Short Answers From James Franco About his Upcoming Film, Bukowski

James Franco’s appearance at Sundance this year was a stunner. But then again the risk-taking renaissance man is accustomed to surprising his critics. At Sundance’s New Frontiers the actor/director/producer/visiting professor/writer presented his collaborative effort with gay filmmaker Travis Mathews. The graphic sixty-minute documentary Interior. Leather Bar, a hard core riff on the gay leather bar scene, and two other films, Kink and Lovelace, 

Documentary Filmmaker Andrew Jenks Makes Compassion Cool on MTV’s World of Jenks

Andrew Jenks wasn’t the first free spirit to drop out of college. He also wasn’t the first to do it despite having two successful parents, one of whom currently serves as the Assistant Secretary General for the United Nations. But he was certainly the first to go from the halls of NYU straight into an assisted living facility, where the documentary he shot, Andrew Jenks, Room 335, was quickly acquired by HBO,

Meet Gary Jones, the Man Behind the Fantastical Fashion of Oz The Great and Powerful

The clothes make the man, as they say. And in Disney’s Oz The Great and Powerful, director Sam Raimi (Spider-Man, The Evil Dead) and his team of designers found themselves with not just a man to make but a few fashionable witches, a carnival crew, some Munchkins and indeed a whole army of Winkie guards.

With Oscar® winner Robert Stromberg (Avatar,

Sony Pictures Classics Gives Woody Allen’s Latest To Rome With Love The Blu-ray Treatment

There is a scene in Robert B. Weide’s 2012 American Masters special, Woody Allen: A Documentary, in which Allen, sitting casually atop a bed in an unassuming guestroom that betrays the elegant townhouse on Manhattan’s Upper East Side that contains it, takes out an array of paper scraps encompassing a career’s worth of film plots. Or, for the most prolific force in cinema, releasing a movie a year for the past four decades,

Hearing Is Believing: MPAA’s TED2013 Master Class With Music Supervisor Randall Poster

Everyone knows ‘seeing is believing,’ but master music supervisor Randall Poster will tell you: what you hear in motion pictures is just as tantamount to the images whirring across the screen. Poster is one of the most sought after music supervisors in Hollywood (a sampling from his impressive oeuvre: Rushmore!, Velvet Goldmine, Boardwalk Empire) —and he brought his prowess to TED2013, where he hosted the dynamic MPAA sponsored-Master Class,

The Last Exorcism Part II’s Ashley Bell Shares Another Dance With the Devil

When we last saw Nell Sweetzer she was in the middle of the woods at the top of an altar giving virgin birth to a demon baby while the reverend who tried to save her soul suffered a fate that would make William Peter Blatty proud. If it made fans cringe, well, that was the point. Nearly three years and $68 million in box-office receipts later (against a budget of $1.8mm), The Last Exorcism has an awkwardly named but hotly anticipated sequel,

From Return of the Jedi to Jack the Giant Slayer, the Worlds of Production Designer Gavin Bocquet

Starting out as a draftsman on Return of the Jedi (1983), Gavin Bocquet’s career as a production designer coincided with the development and implementation of CGI technology into all spheres of the movie business. Bocquet was at the forefront of that revolution, working regularly for George Lucas, honing his craft on the TV show The Young Indiana Jones Adventures and the trilogy of Star Wars prequels. His career reflects the developing integration between practical production design and ever evolving CGI technology.

The Polymath: Chatting With John Ottman, Composer and Editor of Jack the Giant Slayer

Perhaps one of the most famous film sequences of the past thirty years was edited together in a living room using a splicer. By somebody who is also a composer. A composer who has gone on to score a slew of films (while somewhat begrudgingly continuing to edit, too), making him one of the few people in the film industry who is a professional at both of these demanding positions. John Ottman,

Lovesick: Comedian Natasha Leggero Knocks Our Socks Off in the Ben Stiller Produced Burning Love

Sixteen lovelorn bachelorettes bunk up in an L.A. mansion where they’ll compete for the heart of hunky firefighter Mark Orlando and, naturally, embark on some epic makeout sessions and drunken catfights along the way. If it sounds like the “plot” to just about every reality show out there, that’s because it is. But Burning Love, an instant cult classic that started as a Yahoo web series and began its TV run on E!